u/No_Force_8700

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Hi,

what started as a small hobby project became a real app project for analogue photographers and camera collectors. ShuttR is now on the App Store: it measures how accurate your film camera's shutter actually is by filming the open gate with your iPhone's slow-mo. I often rann into the problem that I don’t know how accurate the shutters of my older cameras are, that’s why I tried to find a solution with an app instead of having to use additional accessory. 

 It is accurate from 1s (and slower) down to 1/500 and requires a light source (e.g. another phone, tablet, headlamp etc.), a dark room and your iPhone – that’s it  (iOS17 or higher is required).

 With help of the community here  I was able to get quite some real life test results in addition to having checked all my own camera collection of SLRs. In the end the app was tested on a real mix of bodies, mostly being older SLRs to some rangefinders but also large format cameras – super exciting. Lots of feedback was put back into the app. In the end much more work than I anticipated but I’m happy to have landed on an app that does quite a lot now.

 A few things it can do besides testing of your shutter speeds:

• “Camera Collection” — saves your cameras and lets you watch how each shutter drifts over time (or not ;) )
• Import/export for your cameras and results, so you can get your data as a spreadsheet.

I’ve been restoring vintage cameras for a while and also started developing Nikon F Series battery holders on the side (Snapback — battery adapters for old F-series bodies). One thing I stumbled upon quite often on these older cameras was: is the shutter on this 40-year-old body actually still accurate?
The usual answer is a $30–100 hardware tester, or an app that needs one anyway. I wanted to see if an iPhone alone could do it — no extra sensors, no dongles.
After a fair amount of trial and error I landed on an approach that works entirely with the phone’s camera. I tested it against a Canon A-1 (mechanical cloth shutter) and a Nikon F90 (electronic metal shutter) across their full speed range, each speed fired twice for repeatability. Both cameras came back consistent to within a fraction of a stop across most of the range, and the two very different shutter designs held up equally well — which was the main thing I wanted to confirm before building further.
Turns out the A-1 is basically spot-on across the board. The F90, being electronically timed, was even tighter — a nice sanity check for the whole approach.
I’m now building this into a proper app (iOS, guided step-by-step measurement, no extra hardware, works with cloth/metal/leaf shutters). Needs an iPhone XR or newer running iOS 17+. Before I put it on the App Store I’d like a small group of beta testers via TestFlight — ideally people with different shutter types and iPhone models, so I can validate across more real-world gear than just my own two cameras.
If you’ve got an old SLR (or three) lying around and are curious what its shutter is actually doing, drop a comment or DM — happy to add you to the TestFlight beta, completely free during testing.
(Not trying to sell anything here — genuinely want more data points before launch, and figured this community would find the results as interesting as I did.)

Hi everyone, I‘m new to Super8 and I‘m super excited about my first experiences! Coming from a film photography background I bought a used Nikon R8 which I‘m super happy about. Unfortunately the one I received had a faulty battery holder. As I‘m a trained designer myself I developed a 3d printed substitute and finally my camera works. Just wanted to let you know when someone needs either the 3d print file or an already assembled holder for a Nikon R8 or R10 let me know!